Tag: Tiziana Terranova

Hard Copies of The Birth of Digital Populism book will be available on Friday at UEL’s Affect and Social Media seminar

Really thrilled to say that The Birth of Digital Populism book has just arrived and will be available (by making a donation) for the first time in hard copy at the Affect and Social Media research seminar at UEL this Friday (27th Feb).

It is a beautiful book designed & co-edited by Francesco Taccini – currently at the RCA.

The Blurb

The Birth of Digital Populism. Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy in the 21st Century

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The Five Star Movement led by Grillo & Casaleggio had an unexpected success in the Italian general elections of February 2013, deeply disrupting the panorama of Italian politics. This book seeks to explore some of the features characterising the emergence of a new political phenomenon: digital populism. We asked Italian and English thinkers from different political and disciplinary backgrounds to contribute to an analysis of some fundamental points behind the rise of populism and the digital relations between masses, power and democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This is the result of nine interviews carried out between May 2013 and February 2014 with Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Godani Paul, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.

Here is the free book “The birth of digital populism. Crowd, power and post-democracy in the 21st century”

Here is the free book from Obsolete Capitalism

“The birth of digital populism. Crowd, power and post-democracy in the 21st century” featuring Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Paolo Godani, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.

The book, which is published by Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, is under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International) and can be read or downloaded from the digital publishing platform Issuu at the following address:

http://is.gd/E1hq8d

Blurb
The Five Star Movement led by Grillo & Casaleggio had an unexpected success in the Italian general elections of February 2013, deeply disrupting the panorama of Italian politics. This book seeks to explore some of the features characterising the emergence of a new political phenomenon: digital populism. We asked Italian and English thinkers from different political and disciplinary backgrounds to contribute to an analysis of some fundamental points behind the rise of populism and the digital relations between masses, power and democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. This is the result of nine interviews carried out between May 2013 and February 2014 with Luciana Parisi, Tiziana Terranova, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Paolo Godani, Saul Newman, Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano.

Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova’s Interview on “Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century

There is a translated double interview with Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova on Rizomatika. The interview is also available and sharable in PDF format.

Previous interviews were held with: Parikka, Newman, Sampson, Choat, Toscano e Berti; and in Italian: Parikka, Newman, Sampson, Choat, Berti, Parisi & Terranova , Godani.

The final stage of the Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century project (freely published by Obsolete Capitalism and Rizomatika) is to become an e-book published in April.

More to follow…

 

 

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Luciana Parisi, Italian, lives and works in London. She is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) where she runs the PhD program at the Centre for Cultural Studies. Her research examines the links between science and philosophy, cybernetics and information, technology and policy in order to formulate a critique of capitalism and at the same time investigate the possibility of real change. During the nineties of the last century she has been working with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick (UK) and has written several essays in collaboration with Steve Goodman (known in the music world as dominus of dubstep as Kode9). In 2004 she published the book “Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the
Mutations of Desire” (Continuum, London, 2004), where she described the critical impasse between the notions of body, sexuality, “gender” and the current status of the studies of science and technology. Her latest work on architectural models is “Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space” (MIT Press, USA, 2013).

Tiziana Terranova, Italian, lives and works in Naples. She is a contemporary researcher, and lecturer of ” Cultural Studies and Media ‘ and ‘ Cultural Theories and New Media” at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. After graduating from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Department of American, Cultural and Linguistic Studies at University of Naples she continued her research on media, cultural studies and new technologies, driven by a passion for this area. The study of these issues took place in England where she achieved a master’s degree in “Communications and Technology” at Brunel University. She also achieved the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths’ College in London. In the mid 90’s Tiziana Terranova dealt with technological subcultures, cyberpunk and published one of the first doctoral thesis on the internet newsgroups and the techno culture in California. Another important experience for her intellectual journey took place in London at the Department of Cultural Studies of the University of “East London” where she founded and directed along with Helene Kennedy one of the first courses in Multimedia, starting the new university course in “Media and New Media Studies”. Her current interests include digital culture and the phenomena that develop around it. Of international importance is her book “Culture Network” published in Italy in 2006 by Il Manifesto. Her last essay entitled ‘Capitalism cognitive and neural life’ was inserted in May 2013 e.Book issue called ‘The state of technological mediation’ by Giorgio Griziotti (Special Hypermedia – Alfabeta editions).

Alberto Toscano: interview with the authors of Rizomatika & ObsoleteCapitalism

After the publication of a first cycle of interviews on crowds, power and post-democracy, and the relative
translation to Italian, we proceed with the second and final installment.

Alberto Toscano

Next are Lapo Berti, Luciana Parisi and finally Tiziana Terranova.

PAYING ATTENTION – CULTURE MACHINE…

 

Really looking forward to reading Tiziana Terranova’s ‘Attention, Economy and the Brain’ in the latest issue of Culture Machine (see link below). It looks at Tarde and the brain, and makes references to neuroscience, as do some of the posts on this blog and the latter part of Virality. This is in fact great timing as I’m currently developing new material on neuroculture and subjectification for a future book project! Some more posts will follow on this article…

CULTURE MACHINE 13 (2012)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

PAYING ATTENTION
edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

How are the ways we understand subjective experience – not least
cognitively – being modulated by political economic rationales? And how
might artists, cultural theorists, social scientists and radical
philosophers learn to respond – analytically, creatively,
methodologically and politically – to the commodification of human
capacities of attention? This special issue of Culture Machine explores
these interlinked questions as a way of building upon and opening out
contemporary research concerning the economisation of cognitive
capacities. It proposes a contemporary critical re-focussing on the
politics, ethics and aesthetics of the ‘attention economy’, a notion
developed in the 1990s by scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Michael
Goldhaber and Georg Franck.

Contents

Patrick Crogan, Samuel Kinsley, ‘Paying Attention: Towards a Critique of
the Attention Economy’

Bernard Stiegler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’

Tiziana Terranova, ‘Attention, Economy and the Brain’

Jonathan Beller, ‘Wagers Within the Image: Rise of Visuality,
Transformation of Labour, Aesthetic Regimes’

Samuel Kinsley, ‘Towards Peer-to-Peer Alternatives: An Interview with
Michel Bauwens’

Sy Taffel, ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality and
Ecological Cost’

Ben Roberts, ‘Attention-seeking: Technics, Publics and Software
Individuation’

Taina Bucher, ‘A Technicity of Attention: How Software “Makes Sense”’

Martyn Thayne, ‘Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised
Subjectivity in the Attention Economy’

Rolien Hoyng, ‘Popping Up and Fading Out: Participatory Networks and
Istanbul’s Creative City Project’

Bjarke Liboriussen, ‘Second Life: Message (to Professionals), Attention!
Economic Bubble (to the Rest of Us)’

Bjarke Liboriussen, Ursula Plesner, ‘Current Architectural Use of
Virtual Worlds’

Ruth Catlow, ‘We Won’t Fly for Art: Media Art Ecologies’

Constance Fleuriot, ‘Avoiding Vapour Trails in the Virtual Cloud:
Developing Ethical Design Questions for Pervasive Media Producers’

The Blurb for Virality the Book

ImageThe blurb for Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks

A new theory of viral relationality beyond the biological

“Impressive and ambitious, Virality offers a new theory of the viral as a sociological event.” – Brian Rotman, Ohio State University

 

“Tarde and Deleuze come beautifully together in this outstanding book, the first to really put forward a serious alternative to neo-Darwinian theories of virality, contagion, and memetics. A thrilling read that bears enduring consequences for our understanding of network cultures. Unmissable.” – Tiziana Terranova, author of Network Culture  

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not limit itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is the way society comes together and relates.

Sampson argues that a biological understanding of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This understanding is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, including problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as universal as that of the biological meme and microbe, but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson leads us to understand contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview.

According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to over-categorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.

Dr. Tony D. Sampson is senior lecturer and researcher in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London.